As successful as our armor production had been, I really didn't want to be the only person capable of inventing new items. But I had the only computer interface that could read the lab table's results.

At first I thought about getting a second computer and putting it and my untouched arm on our new lab table. Fortunately I tested an idea out before doing that.

"Hey O, give me your arm."

O gave me a quizzical look but proceeded to present his arm to me.

"No, I mean send it over to me in inventory."

O could not. He commented, "Interesting, I wonder why our body parts are different from ordinary items."

I didn't know, but it didn't matter. I was the only person who could see the correct outcomes, and that prevented others from getting the same computer upgrade.

So we went back to the drawing board, so to speak, and considered two possible options. First, we could ask someone to try to merge with a computer blindly. I was a big no on that, but as always O felt strongly that such experimentation was beyond moral evaluation.

Looking back on my situation, I had been damn lucky. Since then, virtually everyone who had merged body parts with other objects had ended up grossly disfigured.

Our second option would be to find a way to record and send the data from the table to me. While I would still be the bottle neck on picking the winner, at least the mixing and matching portion could be tackled by others.

Once again, Noa led us to the answer.

"So you want people to send you the data from their tables?"

"Yes."

"You mean like the way we send chat messages?" She asked.

"Yes, exactly like that." I replied.

"So why not just merge your chat interface with the lab table?"

"Why not merge the chat interface? Wait, is that even possible?"

She shrugged, "I have no idea. Why don't you try it and tell me?"

Leave it to the Israelis, they don't sugar coat anything.

I put our lab table on the lab table and then pulled up my menu. I realized I wasn't actually dragging and dropping the chat menu onto the table, but however this interface worked, that is exactly how it looked.

I then analyzed the footage after the merge and found a dozen candidates that looked promising. Unlike the other merges we did, where you could see the outcome, merging a menu item wouldn't really show me anything different. However, I could see all of the examples where the table looked messed up and eliminate those. I took the dozen best looking options and gave them out to the team to test.

Charlie ended up with the winning version of the table. I received a chat request from him. When I clicked, one of those swirling, pulsating merge blobs appeared. I dragged it to my console and it generated all the possible outcomes.

"Damn you Charlie, stop with the KFC!"

I looked at my screen at what appeared to be a Pizza Hut pizza with a crust made from fried chicken. I think what bothered me most about Charlie's creation was that it looked exactly like the type of gimmick they would have made in a real food lab.

Ok, so I produced one and ate it. So what! I did it for science!

Science is delicious.

More importantly, we had a way to scale up our research now.

We had the tools, now we needed the people power. Once again, Sara's organizational skills kicked in.

We created flyers advertising ourselves as a school to develop your abilities. Eyal and Noa took to the streets and before they returned from postering for the day people already began streaming in.

I generated a list of all the possible combinations of items we wanted to record. After networking with the new recruits, Sara would send them the list and ask them to pick the assignments they could fulfill.

In return, the people who joined us received the fruits of our labor. Food was a favorite. Even though people could just absorb their food, they couldn't get enough of our novel creations. Charlie led the charge on that. Ice Cream French Fries, Chocolate Avocado, Chocolate Potato Chips, Banana Bacon, Blueberry Steak, and of course, Mt. Dew Flavored Fried Chicken.

As our ranks grew, the most enthusiastic participants were promoted to leads and began recruiting teams directly. People started to self form into groups that worked together. One group focused on construction concepts, another on clothing, another on vehicles, and so forth.

Eyal came to us one day and told us he could no longer keep our block secure with so many people coming and going.

"We need to move someplace where everyone can stay on site. We've attracted way too much attention and those enforcers are starting to attack them to get access to some of our inventions. We can't protect people when they leave here."

We talked at dinner about the problem.

"I am too busy to move my research again." Wen declared.

"I too don't want to waste time moving." O said.

I didn't want to move either, but more for nostalgic reasons. This had become home.

Charlie came to the rescue. He raised his hand timidly.

"Charlie, I've told you that you don't need to wait to be called on. Just tell us what you are thinking."

"Why don't we create a building on this site?"

I looked over at Eyal. "Just make sure it can be defended easily."

Charlie did not disappoint.

Charlie's plans involved structural elements not possible with today's manufacturing techniques. He had single glass panes that spanned one hundred feet into the air. He envisioned a transportation system that I could swear he pulled straight from the Jetsons.

He asked me to synthesize a super thin, super strong concrete like material. I popped it into my computer and out came the magic. This stuff was crazy. I'd never seen a wall so thin and still so strong. We dubbed it Charlete. Charlie smiled, said thanks, and walked off like the coolest thing in the world hadn't just happened.

Our teams of researchers transformed into teams of builders. Charlie's crew grew into the hundreds. With it, our square block of New York became a beacon of the possible.

And people called it that, the Beacon. The Beacon might not be the tallest building in the world at 100 stories, but it would be the most unique. Here was the layout.

The first five floors combined into a huge living atrium. A mix of metal stalagmites and impossibly large trees held up the remaining 95 floors above it. A wall of glass bordered the entire square block at ground level. You could approach the glass from any location and press your hand against it. The glass would slide in on invisible tracks along the ground. After a few seconds it would slide back into place, the seams vanishing into the wall.

And that glass was only called glass because you could see through it. Since our first attempt at armor we had made improvements to materials that enabled the walls of our building to sustain a howitzer round.

In six locations around the first floor, huge glass tubes reached like veins up through the building. You could stand on the glass floor of one of those tubes and be whisked up to any floor.

The residences occupied the top 70 floors. Each floor chose a theme. Jungle, tundra, ocean, there was even a floor of ice and snow.

The twenty five floors between the residences and the atrium provided the working space for different divisions.

Wen's lab occupied the largest space. The machine they had rushed to move from Columbia looked significantly larger and more complex. The lab needed six stories and most of the center of the building to house the monstrous machine. Unfortunately, even with all of those months of work by Wen, it still did not work.

Charlie's construction and manufacturing teams occupied two full floors. Mostly they worked on construction projects, but they also continued enhancing vehicles in their space. One of those vehicles became an icon people could see from the New Jersey side of the river when looking over at the Beacon. Hanging outside the building's exterior wall on floor 12 floated a new type of magnetic levitation train whose tracks had yet to be fully synthesized. It looked totally steampunk as cogs and wheels spun around, but there was nothing antiquated about the interior of this bad boy. I couldn't wait until we built a track and took it out.

Eyal and Noa split a floor. Eyal ran a training ground to build up our security forces. He refused to rely only on the armor to protect the teams. He leveled them up with skills including fighting, negotiation, observation and military strategy. Then, he made them drill over and over again.

Noa turned her chemistry skills into bad ass weapons. Noa might have been a crazy good fighter, but she preferred not to hurt people. Some of her most successful concoctions included laughy taffy, a gas canister that caused the person to laugh uncontrollably for twenty minutes, Soups Up, a grenade that exploded out stringy cheese that stuck to everything and oddly smelled of French Onion Soup, and my personal favorite, the F bomb. I have no idea how she did it, but the F bomb would encase a person in a nearly unbreakable plastic bubble, and when the person attempted to break out it would sound like the bubble was saying "F U". Genius.

O and I split a floor to focus on new methods for merging the code together. O had become obsessed with the idea that we had to modify ourselves at a more fundamental level. It scared me.

Sara controlled a floor to run administration of the Beacon and all of our projects and people. The Beacon housed 1,500 people now. While some had come off the street on their own, most we had recruited. I provided a list much like the first one we used to build our core management team. Sara and Eyal took a new and improved Little Jefe out and ran a recruiting campaign that put Google and Goldman Sachs to shame.

Everything was going amazingly well.

Isn't that when someone pulls the rug out from under you?